Re: Benchmark for Spriest dps?

Originally Posted by firefly31

Our class is a utility class. While other classes may have replenishment, ours is the most constant form of mana return to the parties. if you want to hit 4k+ dps, roll a lock. If you like raiding on a shadow priest, then you hopefully understand the role we play when in a raid.

Not as I read it. All 3 classes appear to be able to keep replenishment buff up for a similar % of the time.

Bear in mind that many SWP chars will not be doing hugely (if any) more damage with the expansion - no chaining of drums or bloodlusts, potions having longer cooldown, more mana issues, different group/raid buff system will all nerf damage alot - especially the drums/lust change.

All in all Blizzard aims that we will DPS and Scale almost as well as all other classes. They will need to judge what effect these nerfs will have on overall DPS and then perhaps modify them.

Re: Benchmark for Spriest dps?

Hm, really interesting thread. There is a point mentionned here that I don't really understand. Some of you sayed replenishment should lower our dps vs other classes. I thought a bit about it.

So at lvl 70 replenishment regenrates some 23 mana per second.
At lvl 80 this should double (mana pool also doubles +-) so I got something around 44 mana per second. This is during 14 sec if my memory is right. (not important although)

That makes 115mp5 at lvl 70, and 230 mp5 at lvl 80.

These numbers don't really scale with gear. In addition people with lower manapools (hunters, enh shamies, prot pallies) only get 175 mp5 I guess.

So on the one side there is some kind of raid utility in there, but it's really small, you can live without it.

Re: Benchmark for Spriest dps?

I would first like to say that I raid Sunwell in 6/8 T6, I love the Spriest class on LIVE, and I own face in PVP with 4/5 Brutal.

For those that feel that "Lower DPS is okay since we are a utility class" must be missing something or perhaps I am. Given current wording, I don't believe we return nearly as much mana as we did thus we should be much more competitive on the damage given the reduction is our utility. (Perhaps the Vampiric Touch Healing is a significant factor in our "utility.")

-(Live) Vampiric Touch Rank 3 - Causes 650 Shadow damage over 15 sec to your target and causes all party members to gain mana equal to 5% of any Shadow spell damage you deal.
-(Beta) Vampiric Touch Rank 5 - Causes 850 Shadow damage over 15 sec to your target and causes up to 10 party or raid members to gain 0.25% of their maximum mana per second when you deal damage from Mind Blast.

Normally Mind Blast is an 8 second cooldown, but fully talented it's a 5.5 CD. I must admit I have not being paying too close of attention to level 80 beta toons, but I am going to assume casters have approximately 20k mana. So 20,000 * .0025 = 50 Mana every ~7.0 Seconds (5.5 CD + 1.5 Cast {No Haste})

In comparison Blessing Of Wisdom Rank 9 - Places a Blessing on the friendly target, restoring 91 mana every 5 seconds for 10 min. Players may only have one Blessing on them per Paladin at any one time.

Correct me if I misunderstood VT, otherwise we really are getting penalized on damage based upon VE Healing?

Re: Benchmark for Spriest dps?

Originally Posted by STM127

-(Beta) Vampiric Touch Rank 5 - Causes 850 Shadow damage over 15 sec to your target and causes up to 10 party or raid members to gain 0.25% of their maximum mana per second when you deal damage from Mind Blast.

Normally Mind Blast is an 8 second cooldown, but fully talented it's a 5.5 CD. I must admit I have not being paying too close of attention to level 80 beta toons, but I am going to assume casters have approximately 20k mana. So 20,000 * .0025 = 50 Mana every ~7.0 Seconds (5.5 CD + 1.5 Cast {No Haste})

Fail at math ;-)

10 party or raid members to gain 0.25% of their maximum mana per second which is part of a 15 second buff I believe. So when you cast MB they get replenishment for 10-15 secs (not sure) and then when you cast is again they either get the duration reset OR someone else gets an iteration of the buff.

so at 20,000max mana -> 50 mana every second -> 250 Mp5

However!

For those that feel that "Lower DPS is okay since we are a utility class" must be missing something or perhaps I am

Re: Benchmark for Spriest dps?

Originally Posted by jhemfl

I used to play a Sunwell Raiding Shadow Priest. We've all had our QQ's due to our bad scaling and low dps and whatnot so I did something about it. I leveled a Mage to make my main in WotLK. I used to raid as a Rogue right when TBC came out, then I took a break and came back as a Shadow Priest. I guess I miss the pure dps aspect of raiding which is why I chose Mage. I know Mages might not be top dps or whatever, but that's another topic. I really liked my Shadow Priest but their low dps (but excellent utility) just didn't suit me.

I started seeing all these posts the past few weeks about how Shadow Priests damage has substantially increased which gave me hope that maybe I will go back to raiding Shadow if I can keep up (not be on top, but not be 15th either) with the big dogs. Then I read this:

While Dispersion might not drastically increase your raid damage, not all talents are designed as such. We experimented with giving it some added DPS to it, but we had to take it off because the Shadow Priest was exceeding our bench mark for DPS. It was also strange gameplay (what if you got hit while it was channeling? You'd feel really bad. Also its supposed to be your defense mechanism in PvP, but yet now you want to use it for DPS

They stated that there will not be any op new tailor made sets like frosen set was... Instead we got Flying carpet.

So apparently Blizzard has a specific spot they want Shadow Priests on the dps scale. Which is cool but Shadow Priests always had an issue with gear scaling. Meaning that if they put Shadow Priests lower than Mages, Locks, Hunters, Warriors now...Just think of how bad it MIGHT be when we're in the higher end game content (remember Shadow Priests were near top dps up until about late t5 content mainly due to The FSW set, who knows if another set like this will become available). Seems like they're digging a hole for themselves by setting a place they want Spriest dps at, because in the long run they are going to have to perfectly tweak Spriest gear to scale them properly. This has me leaning back towards maining my Mage for Wrath.

I was just wondering what other people thought about this 'benchmark'.

(Again, I'm not saying a utility class should be topping the charts or anything. Also, the gear scaling speculation I had about Wotlk is indeed only a speculation.)

"The raid game will ramp up over time. There will be many extremely difficult encounters for people to face. But the early bosses in Naxx are intended to be beatable very early on.
The 10's will get hard too. It's not a casual/hardcore thing. It's more about ramping difficulty and progression”